Tag Archives: health

Forbes recently published an op-ed comparing the outbreak and spread of the Ebola virus with the value of cures to prevent disease and save lives. The author – Merrill Matthews – is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, Texas. Matthews asserts that drug companies are in the business of discovering cures for deadly and debilitating diseases, and need support for expediting research and development by cutting through red tape and Read More >

Gaucher Disease is one of the over 6,000 rare diseases that affect patients worldwide, representing a frontier of unmet medical need [NCATS, NIH]. The challenges for drug development generally—long and costly research and development timelines—are exacerbated by the inherently small patient populations affected by rare diseases. These patients can be difficult to identify and geographically dispersed and their clinical presentation can be quite disparate, complicating the design and recruitment for clinical trials used to determine Read More >

Football fans are gearing up for tonight’s opening game when the defending Champion Seattle Seahawks take on the Green Bay Packers, and last minute fantasy leaguers are scrambling to finish their drafts and set their starting line-ups. The NFL has also been in the news recently following preliminary approval of a deal in the class-action lawsuit to compensate former players for concussion-related injury claims. According to a 2012 study in Neurology, NFL players are three Read More >

The New Republic this week published a lengthy, powerful piece by Kent Russell on Alzheimer’s. Russell opens the piece by noting that we are approaching a public health crisis in Alzheimer’s and dementia: Alzheimer’s disease is practically unheard of in adults younger than 40, and very rare (one in 2,500) for those under 60. It affects 1 percent of 65-year-olds, 2 percent of 68-year-olds, 3 percent of 70-year-olds. After that, the odds start multiplying. The Read More >

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge – the social media phenomenon in which people post videos of themselves dumping buckets of water on their heads – has swept through social media like wildfire as part of an effort to raise both awareness and funding for ALS research. It’s pretty safe to say that it’s working. As of Thursday morning, the ALS Association had received $41.8 million from existing donors and more than 739,000 new donors over Read More >